Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...VERY USED to things happening rapidly," chirps convent-bred Alizon Eliot in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning. The current Dunster House production of the existential comedy-drama should give her little reason to fret. In three acts spanning almost as many hours, the cast of this show prattles prosaically but interminably about whether it is more significant to hang, burn or continue with the business of living in the dreary Middle Ages. By the end of it all, the resolution of these and other conflicts in the plot seems less important than the necessity to stretch...
...Victoria was never quite at home in that world, despite her intense reverence for its grandeur and tradition. Brought up in the isolation of a rented villa, a decorous distance from her father's diplomatic post, she was put in a convent after her mother died in childbirth. Not until she was 19, when her father was appointed British Minister to Washington, did Victoria obtain a glimpse of high society. She was notably unworldly for an heiress of one of England's great families and vacillated between those polarities of temperament that her daughter described as "the gypsy...
...front of her house. So did 100 police, on horses and in riot gear, assigned to protect the house from vandalism. Said one skeptical youth: "If there is no money in there, why are all these police guarding the house?" By this time, Sheehan had fled to a convent for safety. It took police a full day of persuasion, plus 19 arrests, to convince the crowd that the whole situation was much ado about nothing...
...course there were problems-philosophical, psychological and physical. Camus, afflicted by tuberculosis, struggled merely to survive. "Illness is a convent," he writes, "which has its rule, its austerity, its silences, and its inspirations...
Soon afterward, that convent was invaded by the chaos of Nazi occupation. The hero of the French underground says little of his hazardous wartime activities. After the fall of France, he takes time for a note of Proustian sensuality: "Every year, the young girls come into flower on the beaches. They have only one season. The following year, they are replaced by other flower-like faces which, the previous season, still belonged to little girls. For the man who looks at them, they are yearly waves whose weight and splendor break into foam over the yellow sand." The minutes stolen...